Kristen Stewart's face doesn't care about your Twilight memes
Love Lies Bleeding is one of the movie of the year. Elsewhere, the romcom is back (again), and so is terrible landfill horror. Hooray?
A little programming note for this week. I didn’t get chance to see The Fall Guy, so I’ll be covering that one next week instead. Still plenty to enjoy this time around though!
Glass shatters us with lesbian noir romance
There’s a sequence in Rose Glass’s brilliant neo-noir thriller Love Lies Bleeding where bodybuilder Jackie (Katy M O'Brian) shows off her competition poses to her new lover Lou (Kristen Stewart). O’Brian’s physique is very impressive, but it becomes even more so when the camera cuts to Stewart. Her eyes are wide and focused, while her chest rises and falls with increasing intensity. Without saying a word, Stewart makes it transparently clear that Lou is completely enraptured and obsessed with the beautiful stranger she met just a few days earlier.
It wasn’t that long ago that Kristen Stewart’s face was one of the internet’s biggest memes. During peak Twilight mania, you couldn’t move for snark about her supposedly inexpressive performance style. So, for those of us who always thought she was brilliant, it has been a delight to see Stewart become one of the most unpredictable, fascinating, and bold actors on the planet. Love Lies Bleeding is yet more evidence of her remarkable abilities — many of which, for the benefit of any trolls reading, involve using her face.
The movie is a Coenesque neo-noir with a blackly comic streak and surprising lashings of magical realism. It starts as pure romance, with perhaps the only meet-cute ever to involve injecting steroids in the butt. But then an increasingly roid-infused Jackie becomes involved in the abusive relationship between Lou’s sister Beth (Jena Malone) and her sleazebag husband JJ (Dave Franco), sparking a panicked escape and a collision course with Lou’s deep-fried crime boss father (Ed Harris).
But this is a Rose Glass movie and so plot is less important than ambition, style, and an unstoppable sense of claustrophobia. Her debut feature Saint Maud concluded with an unforgettable final shot and Love Lies Bleeding begins with the same level of pure intensity — Clint Mansell’s kinetic score throbbing as the camera tracks around a gym, pausing to ogle muscles clenching, body hair quivering, and sweat dripping by the bucketload. To say it’s immersive is an understatement.
Stewart’s jittery, diminutive Lou immediately sticks out like the sore thumb she is in that environment, right up until she sees Jackie. It’s as if two lost souls have found each other by pure, beautiful coincidence. Of course, Glass — who co-wrote the script with Weronika Tofilska — takes great pleasure in puncturing that perfection almost immediately. In this world, the roulette wheel of violence eventually lands on everyone. You just have to hope you survive when it’s your turn.
Glass is fascinated by the idea of Jackie’s body as a deadly weapon, deploying a sound effect akin to cracking bones as her veins pop through the skin in a way that we’re never quite sure is real. The apotheosis of this comes in a climactic sequence that takes a (literally) enormous swing in a way that really works. Because while this is ostensibly a gritty, real-world thriller, it flirts with awestruck unreality in occasional flourishes, including a desert dumping ground that’s bathed in an almost extra-terrestrial blue glow.
While Stewart’s unique, mannered charisma holds much of the film together, O’Brian is given a more challenging job and rises to the occasion brilliantly in her first leading role. Her roided-up loose cannon could have easily been a cliché, but O’Brian brings a pain and complexity to Jackie that makes her as utterly charming as she is terrifying. When the characters split up in the movie’s second half, they each feel like the solitary half of a double act, as afraid of each other as they are completely unable to stay away. You know the stove is hot, but you just have to touch it to check.
Glass relishes the prickly edges of her characters and their world, allowing the dark and the light to mingle throughout the story. Anna Baryshnikov’s obsessive oddball ex of Lou’s is pure redneck comic caricature, while Ed Harris slimes his way around with lank hair like he’s escaped from an SNL skit. But that all contrasts beautifully with the genuinely horrific violence, the misty-eyed romance, and those aforementioned flashes of magical stardust. It’s an irresistible collage of tones and genres, fusing to create something that’s far more original than just Coen Brothers karaoke.
If Saint Maud announced Rose Glass as a filmmaker worth watching, Love Lies Bleeding shows her love of genre, willingness to innovate, and ability to coax tremendous performances from very different actors. And she’s also given us a lesbian love story for the ages, while waving a middle-finger at those noughties misogynists who kept telling Kristen Stewart to smile. You’ve got to applaud that.
Love Lies Bleeding is in UK cinemas now.
Hathaway’s romcom in Prime position
It feels absurd to say “romcoms are back” but, watching Prime Video’s The Idea of You, it felt very much like a throwback. Just as last year’s Anyone But You had the feel of a return for the sort of straightforward adult romcom that seemed to have gone the way of the dodo, The Idea of You relishes its Nancy Meyers wish-fulfilment vibe. Of course the romcom hasn’t ever really gone away but, with this unashamedly sexy and silly tale, it’s definitely back.
Directed by The Big Sick filmmaker Michael Showalter and based on a novel by Robinne Lee, the film follows 40-year-old single mother Solène (Anne Hathaway). Her cheating ex-husband has bought their teenage daughter backstage meet-and-greet tickets to see the boyband August Moon — years after she was last into their teeny-bopper cheesy pop. But a bathroom mishap puts Solène in a room with the band’s 24-year-old frontman Hayes (Nicholas Galitzine). Instantly, there’s chemistry.
As much as Galitzine does good sensitive musician work in The Idea of You, this film belongs to Hathaway. She’s 100% comfortable in this cosy romcom register, biting her lip as Hayes sings to her from a Coachella stage and managing to add variety and nuance to the cyclical break-ups and multiple false starts in the relationship.
It’s a likeable performance that doesn’t undersell the more serious moments of the story. The Idea of You reckons with the notion of age-gap relationships and the power dynamics within them, further complicated by Hayes’ status as a world-famous musician. Everyone involved with the story has poured cold water on Harry Styles comparisons, but it’s impossible not to see parallels with the former One Direction star and his romances with older women.
It’s a story about how the expectations upon women and men are entirely different when it comes to relationships. “People hate happy women,” one character tells Solène at one stage. The script by Showalter and Jennifer Westfeldt wears these themes lightly, but they’re very much present as a wedge between the couple and a source of narrative tension. In the week that Martin Freeman has given a justifiably baffled response to the controversy around his work with Jenna Ortega in Miller’s Girl, this feels very relevant.
But ultimately, The Idea of You is an uncomplicated and joyful escapist romp with a luminous leading performance. On streaming, and ahead of a chilled Bank Holiday weekend in the UK, it feels right at home.
The Idea of You is available to stream in the UK via Prime Video now.
Is a great horror movie on the cards?
“The death card can mean the end of something, or the start of something new. In this case, it just means death.”
That’s an actual line from the truly awful new teen horror movie Tarot. I sniggered involuntarily when they said it in the middle of a deeply tedious exposition dump set in 18th century Norway. So imagine my surprise when a character repeated the line in the final act. Not only had they gone with the terrible line, but they were so proud of it that they used it twice. Really, that’s indicative of what we’re dealing with here.
It’s the sort of painfully generic landfill horror that, mercifully, is quite rare now having been inescapable in the early-to-mid 2010s. We meet our disposable group of friends — including Spider-Man’s buddy Jacob Batalon — as they party the night away at a rented mansion. When they discover a very old, hand-painted deck of tarot cards, their resident astrology nerd Hailey (Harriet Slater) reluctantly agrees to give the whole group a reading. But uh-oh, the cards are cursed, and they’re soon being picked off one-by-one in bizarre accidents that relate to their readings and the characters on their cards.
If you’re thinking “hey Tom, that sure sounds like Final Destination”, then you’d be right. But Tarot doesn’t have even a modicum of that franchise’s knowingness and inventive approach to Rube Goldberg death sequences. Instead, the characters fall off things in the dark while lazily-designed beasties mug and scream loudly for the camera. Nobody has even a shred of character to make the deaths matter and there’s no real sense of the group’s dynamic or why they’re even friends.
So far, horror fans have had plenty to enjoy in 2024 with the likes of Late Night with the Devil and The First Omen. We’re better off just forgetting that bargain basement trash like Tarot even exists. Fortunately, the film is vanilla enough to make that the easiest of tasks.
Tarot is in UK cinemas now.
Trailer of the Week: Mufasa
2019’s remake of The Lion King was as unimaginative as it was visually impressive. My overriding emotion about this new teaser for prequel Mufasa: The Lion King is that it’s mind-boggling how much the visuals have progressed in just those five years. But I’m cautiously excited overall. Barry Jenkins is a filmmaker who hasn’t yet put a foot wrong and this is an original story within the Disney world, rather than a beat-for-beat retread of a previous animated classic. I’m ready to hear these critters roar.
Mufasa: The Lion King will be released in cinemas on 20th December.
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Next week: Seven years after the ‘War’, we’re back for more from the Planet of the Apes franchise.